Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gvvz8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T16:31:51.334Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Representation and Aggression in Digital Racial Conflict: Analyzing Public Comments during Live-Streamed News of Racial Justice Protests

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 March 2022

Nathan P. Kalmoe Open the ORCID record for Nathan P. Kalmoe [Opens in a new window] ,
P. Brooks Fuller ,
Martina Santia  and
Paromita Saha
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

How do local citizens publicly converse online about the protests that follow when police kill Black residents? And do participants reflect local publics? Here we examine racial justice protests in Baton Rouge after police killed Alton Sterling in 2016. Local news streamed the protests on Facebook Live. In comments appearing below the video, locals supported and attacked each other in real-time while watching protests unfold. We assess a representative sample of these comments. First, we find surprising demographic and political representativeness in comments compared to census data and a local survey. We also document extensive hostile rhetoric corresponding with commenter traits and expressed views. Finally, we find more “likes” for comments by women, college-educated people, and locals. Violent and racially derogatory comments by Blacks received fewer likes, but similar comments by whites went unpenalized. The results illuminate social media functions in local politics, racial disparities in contentious digital dialogues, and political communication’s dual roles in strengthening and undermining multiracial democracy.

Type
Special Issue Articles: Black Lives Matter
Information
Perspectives on Politics , Volume 20 , Issue 4: Special Issue: Black Lives Matter , December 2022 , pp. 1226 - 1245
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Political Science Association

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

A list of permanent links to Supplemental Materials provided by the authors precedes the References section.

*

Data replication sets are available in Harvard Dataverse at: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/RXDOEG

References

Acharya, Avidit, Blackwell, Matthew, and Sen, Maya. 2018. Deep Roots. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Achen, Christopher, and Bartels, Larry M.. 2016. Democracy for Realists. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Adams, Nicholas. 2016. “A Crowd Content Analysis Assembly Line: Scaling Up Hand-Coding with Text Units of Analysis.” SSRN. Retrieved May 1, 2021 (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2808731).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Anderson, Craig A., and Bushman, Brad J.. 2002. “Human Aggression.” Annual Review of Psychology 53:27–51. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.psych.53.100901.135231 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bandura, Arthur, Barbaranelli, Claudio, Caprara, Gian V., and Pastorelli, Concetta. 1996. “Mechanisms of Moral Disengagement in the Exercise of Moral Agency.” Journal of Personality & Social Psychology 71(2): 364–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Benoit, Kenneth, Conway, Drew, Lauderdale, Benjamin E., Laver, Michael, and Mikhaylov, Slava. 2016. “Crowd-Sourced Text Analysis: Reproducible and Agile Production of Political Data.” American Political Science Review 110(2): 278–95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Broockman, David E., and Skovron, Christopher. 2018. “Bias in Perceptions of Public Opinion among Political Elites.” American Political Science Review 112(3): 542–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Burleson, Brant R., and Samter, Wendy. 1985. “Consistencies in Theoretical and Naive Evaluations of Comforting Messages.” Communication Monographs 52(2): 103–23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Burns, Nancy, Schlozman, Kay, and Verba, Sidney. 2001. The Private Roots of Public Action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carmines, Edward G., and Stimson, James A.. 1990. Issue Evolution. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Chau, Michael, and Xu, Jennifer. 2007. “Mining Communities and Their Relationships in Blogs: A Study of Online Hate Groups.” International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 65(1): 57–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chenoweth, Erica, and Stephen, Maria J.. 2011. Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Non-Violent Conflict. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Citron, Danielle Keats. 2017. “Extremist Speech, Compelled Conformity, and Censorship Creep.” Notre Dame Law Review 93(3): 1035–72.Google Scholar
Cook, Lisa D., Logan, Trevon D., and Parman, John M.. 2018. “Rural Segregation and Racial Violence: Historical Effects of Spatial Racism.” American Journal of Economics & Sociology 77(3-4): 821–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Corder, J. Kevin, and Wolbrecht, Christina. 2016. Counting Women’s Ballots: Female Voters from Suffrage to the New Deal. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Davenport, Christian, Armstrong, Dave, and Zeitzoff, Thomas. 2016. “That’s Intense! Scaling Perceptions of Challenger and Government Tactics as Well as Understanding Contentious Interaction.” Working Paper. Retrieved May 1, 2021 (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/305212835_That’s_Intense_Scaling_Perceptions_of_Challenger_and_Government_Tactics_as_well_as_Understanding_Contentious_Interaction).Google Scholar
Davenport, Christian, Soule, Sarah A., and Armstrong, David A. II. 2011. “Protesting while Black? The Differential Policing of American Activism, 1960 to 1990.” American Sociological Review 76(1): 152–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
De Koster, Willem, and Houtman, Dick. 2008. “‘Stormfront Is Like a Second Home to Me’: On Virtual Community Formation by Right-Wing Extremists.” Information, Communication & Society 11(8): 1155–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Du Bois, W.E.B. 1997[1935]. Black Reconstruction. New York: Free Press.Google Scholar
Eckhouse, Laurel. 2019. “Race, Party, and Representation in Criminal Justice Politics.” Journal of Politics 81(3): 1143–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Enos, Ryan D., Kaufman, Aaron R., and Sands, Melissa L.. 2019. “Can Violent Protest Change Local Policy Support? Evidence from the Aftermath of the 1992 Los Angeles Riot.” American Political Science Review 113(4): 1012–28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Erjavec, Karmen, and Kovačič, Melita P.. 2012. “You Don’t Understand, This Is a New War!’ Analyses of Hate Speech in News Websites’ Comments.” Mass Communication & Society 15(6): 899–920.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Farris, Emily M., and Holman, Mirya R.. 2014. “Social Capital and Solving the Puzzle of Black Women’s Political Participation.” Politics, Groups, and Identities 2(3): 331–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fligstein, Neil, and McAdam, Doug. 2011. “Toward a General Theory of Strategic Action Fields.” Sociological Theory 29(1): 1–26.Google Scholar
Foner, Eric. 1988. Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877. New York: HaperCollins.Google Scholar
Francis, Megan Ming. 2014. Civil Rights and the Making of the Modern American State. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gates, Henry Louis Jr.. 2020. Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow. New York: Penguin.Google Scholar
de Zúñiga, Gil, Homero, Logan Molyneux, and Zheng, Pei. 2014. “Social Media, Political Expression, and Political Participation: Panel Analysis of Lagged and Concurrent Relationships.” Journal of Communication 64(4): 612–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gillespie, Tarleton. 2018. Custodians of the Internet. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Grant, Keneisha. 2020. The Great Migration and the Democratic Party: Black Voters and the Realignment of American Politics in the 20th Century. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.Google Scholar
Habermas, Jurgen. 1962. The Structural Transformations of the Public Sphere. Cambridge: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Harris-Lacewell, Melissa. 2006. Bibles, Barbershops, & BET. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Harris-Lacewell, Melissa. 2007. “Righteous Politics: The Role of the Black Church in Contemporary Politics.” Crosscurrents 57(2): 180–96.Google Scholar
Harvey, Paul. 2016. Christianity and Race in the American South. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Hmielowski, Jay D., Hutchens, Myiah J., and Cicchirilo, Vincent. 2014. “Living in an Age of Online Incivility: Examining the Conditional Indirect Effects of Online Discussion on Political Flaming.” Information, Communication and Society 17(10): 1196–211.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Huckfeldt, Robert, Beck, Paul Allen, Dalton, Robert J., and Levine, Jeffrey. 1995. “Political Environments, Cohesive Social Groups, and the Communication of Public Opinion.” American Journal of Political Science 39(4): 1025–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hutchings, Vincent L., and Valentino, Nicholas A.. 2004. “The Centrality of Race in American Politics.” Annual Review of Political Science 7:383–408.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hutchings, Vincent L., Walton, Hanes Jr., and Benjamin, Andrea. 2010. “The Impact of Explicit Racial Cues on Gender Differences in Support for Confederate Symbols and Partisanship.” Journal of Politics 72(4): 1175–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jardina, Ashley. 2019. White Identity Politics. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kalmoe, Nathan P. 2014. “Fueling the Fire: Violent Metaphors, Trait Aggression, and Support for Political Violence.” Political Communication 31(4): 545–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kalmoe, Nathan P. 2020. With Ballots and Bullets: Partisans and Violence in the American Civil War. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kalmoe, Nathan P., and Mason, Lilliana. 2022. Radical American Partisanship: Mapping Violent Hostility, Its Causes, and the Consequences for Democracy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Karpowitz, Christopher F., and Mendelberg, Tali. 2014. The Silent Sex: Gender, Deliberation, and Institutions. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Keele, Luke, Cubbison, William, and White, Ismail K.. 2021. “Suppressing Black Votes: A Historical Case Study of Voting Restrictions in Louisiana.” American Political Science Review 115(2): 694–700.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kinder, Donald R., and Winter, Nicholas. 2001. “Exploring the Racial Divide: Blacks, Whites, and Opinion on National Policy.” American Journal of Political Science 45(2): 439–56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Landis, J. Richard, and Koch, Gary G.. 1977. “The Measurement of Observer Agreement for Categorical Data.” Biometrics 33(1): 159–74.Google ScholarPubMed
Lerman, Amy E., and Weaver, Vesla. 2014. “Staying Out of Sight? Concentrated Policing and Local Political Action.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 651: 202–19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Levay, Kevin E., Freese, Jeremy, and Druckman, James N.. 2016. “The Demographic and Political Composition of Mechanical Turk Samples.” Sage Open. Retrieved May 1, 2021 (https://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/~jnd260/pub/The%20Demographic%20and%20Political%20Composition%20of%20Mechanical%20Turk%20Samples%20Final.pdf).Google Scholar
Lyall, Jason, Blair, Graeme, and Imai, Kosuke. 2013. “Explaining Support for Combatants during Wartime: A Survey Experiment in Afghanistan.” American Political Science Review 107(4): 679–705.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lynn, Joshua A. 2019. Preserving the White Man’s Republic: Jacksonian Democracy, Race, and the Transformation of American Conservatism. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mansbridge, Jane. 1983. Beyond Adversary Democracy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Marwick, Alice, and Lewis, Rebecca. 2017. “Media Manipulation and Disinformation Online.” Data & Society. Retrieved May 1, 2021 (https://datasociety.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/DataAndSociety_MediaManipulationAndDisinformationOnline-1.pdf).Google Scholar
Mason, Lilliana. 2018. Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mazumder, Shom. 2018. “The Persistent Effect of U.S. Civil Rights Protests on Political Attitudes.” American Journal of Political Science 62(4): 922–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McConnaughy, Corrine M. 2013. The Woman Suffrage Movement in America. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McRae, Elizabeth G. 2018. Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy. New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mendelberg, Tali. 2001. The Race Card. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mendelberg, Tali., and Oleske, John. 2000. “Race and Public Deliberation.” Political Communication 17: 169–91.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Michener, Jamila. 2016. “Race, Poverty, and the Redistribution of Voting Rights.” Poverty & Public Policy 8(2): 106–28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mickey, Robert. 2015. Paths Out of Dixie: The Democratization of Authoritarian Enclaves in America’s Deep South, 1944–1972. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Munger, Kevin. 2017. “Tweetment Effects on the Tweeted: An Experiment to Decrease Online Harassment.” Political Behavior 39(3): 629–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mutz, Diana C. 1998. Impersonal Influence. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
O’Donoghue, Julia. 2018. “Louisiana Approves Unanimous Jury Requirement, Scrapping Jim Crow Era Law.” New Orleans Times-Picayune, November 8. Retrieved May 1, 2021 (https://www.nola.com/news/crime_police/article_cae52b78-3812-57ae-8676-ea4dc3a5d3d0.html).Google Scholar
Parker, Christopher S. 2009. Fighting for Democracy: Black Veterans and the Struggle against White Supremacy in the Postwar South. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pew Research Center. 2017. “More Americans Are Turning to Multiple Social Media Sites for News.” November 2. Retrieved May 1, 2021 (https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/11/02/more-americans-are-turning-to-multiple-social-media-sites-for-news/).Google Scholar
Pew Research Center. 2018a. “Social Media Use in 2018.” March 1. Retrieved May 1, 2021 (http://www.pewInternet.org/2018/03/01/social-media-use-in-2018/).Google Scholar
Pew Research Center. 2018b. “Declining Majority of Online Adults Say the Internet Has Been Good for Society.” April 30. Retrieved May 1, 2021 (http://www.pewInternet.org/2018/04/30/declining-majority-of-online-adults-say-the-Internet-has-been-good-for-society/).Google Scholar
Phoenix, Davin. 2019. The Anger Gap: How Race Shapes Emotion in Politics. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Przeworski, Adam. 1991. Democracy and the Market. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schlozman, Kay Lehman, Verba, Sidney, and Brady, Henry E.. 2012. The Unheavenly Chorus: Unequal Political Voice and the Broken Promise of American Democracy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Shirky, Clay. 2011. “The Political Power of Social Media: Technology, the Public Sphere, and Political Change.” Foreign Affairs 90(1): 28–41.Google Scholar
Sides, John, Tesler, Michael, and Vavreck, Lynn. 2018. Identity Crisis. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tesler, Michael. 2016. Post-Racial or Most-Racial? Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Together Baton Rouge. 2017. “Unequal Enforcement: How Policing of Drug Possession Differs by Neighborhood in Baton Rouge.” Retrieved May 1, 2021 (https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/togetherbr/pages/237/attachments/original/1485930293/Together_BR_Unequal_policing_2-2017.pdf?1485930293).Google Scholar
Tufekci, Zeynep. 2017. Twitter and Tear Gas. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Jason, Turcotte, York, Chance, Irving, Jacob, Scholl, Rosanne M., and Pingree, Raymond J.. 2015. “News Recommendations from Social Media Opinion Leaders: Effects on Media Trust and Information Seeking.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 20(5): 520–35.Google Scholar
Valentino, Nicholas A., Neuner, Fabian G., and Vandenbroek, L. Matthew. 2018. “The Changing Norms of Racial Political Rhetoric and the End of Racial Priming.” Journal of Politics 80(3): 757–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ventura, Tiago, Munger, Kevin, McCabe, Katherine, and Chang, Keng-Chi. 2021. “Connective Effervescence and Streaming Chat during Political Debates.” Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media 1. https://doi.org/10.51685/jqd.2021.001 CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Walsh, Katherine Cramer. 2002. Talking about Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Walsh, Katherine Cramer. 2007. Talking about Race. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Walton, Hanes Jr. 1985. Invisible Politics: Black Political Behavior. Albany: SUNY Albany Press.Google Scholar
Wasow, Omar. 2020. “Agenda Seeding: How 1960s Black Protests Moved Elites, Public Opinion and Voting.” American Political Science Review 114(3): 638–59.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Weaver, Vesla. 2007. “Frontlash: Race and the Development of Punitive Crime Policy.” Studies in American Political Development 21(2): 230–65.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Weaver, Vesla, Prowse, Gwen, and Piston, Spencer. 2020. “Withdrawing and Drawing In: Political Discourse in Policed Communities.” Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics 5(3): 604–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wei, Lu, and Hindman, Douglas Blanks. 2011. “Does the Digital Divide Matter More? Comparing the Effects of New Media and Old Media Use on the Education-Based Knowledge Gap.” Mass Communication & Society 14(2): 216–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
White, Ismail K. 2007. “When Race Matters and When It Doesn’t: Racial Group Differences in Response to Racial Cues.” American Political Science Review 101(2): 339–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
White, Ismail K., and Laird, Chryl N.. 2020. Steadfast Democrats: How Social Forces Shape Black Political Behavior. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Williams, Jhacova. 2020. “Historical Lynchings and the Contemporary Voting Behavior of Blacks.” Retrieved May 1, 2021 (https://events.wharton.upenn.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Williams_Voting-2.pdf).Google Scholar
Williams, J., and Romer, Carl. 2020. “Black Deaths at the Hands of Law Enforcement Are Linked to Historical Lynchings.” Working Economics Blog. Retrieved May 1, 2021 (https://www.epi.org/blog/black-deaths-at-the-hands-of-law-enforcement-are-linked-to-historical-lynchings-u-s-counties-where-lynchings-were-more-prevalent-from-1877-to-1950-have-more-officer-involved-killings/).Google Scholar
Supplementary material: Link

Kalmoe et al. Dataset

Dataset

https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/RXDOEG
Link
Supplementary material: File

Kalmoe et al. supplementary material

Kalmoe et al. supplementary material

Download Kalmoe et al. supplementary material(File)
File 83.1 KB